Fossil Hunter

<p>Mary Anning was only twelve years old when in 1811 she discovered the first dinosaur skeleton--of an ichthyosaur--while fossil hunting on the cliffs of Lyme Regis England. Until Mary's incredible discovery it was widely believed that animals did not become extinct. The child of a poor family Mary became a fossil hunter inspiring the tongue-twister She Sells Sea Shells by the Seashore. She attracted the attention of fossil collectors and eventually the scientific world. Once news of the fossils reached the halls of academia it became impossible to ignore the truth. Mary's peculiar finds helped lay the groundwork for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution laid out in his <i>On the Origin of Species.</i> Darwin drew on Mary's fossilized creatures as irrefutable evidence that life in the past was nothing like life in the present. <p/>A story worthy of Dickens <i>The Fossil Hunter</i> chronicles the life of this young girl with dirt under her fingernails and not a shilling to buy dinner who became a world-renowned paleontologist. Dickens himself said of Mary: The carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself and deserved to win it. <p/>Here at last Shelley Emling returns Mary Anning of whom Stephen J. Gould remarked is probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology to her deserved place in history.</p>